Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist working in visual media, especially photography; social practice/community collaboration; performance; and occasionally writing. Her work is focussed on collective relationships—that which exists between things rather than simply within them— both within human communities and in human relationships with the more-than-human world. Much of her recent work wrestles with what it means to be living inside the climate emergency, on the edge of planetary collapse.
Hirmer’s practice is unapologetically sincere in its engagement with the world and deeply connected to the sites, communities and circumstances that surround its creation. Her work finds home both in traditional gallery contexts and an expanded field of other public and semi-public spaces. It is always created with a keen awareness—informed by a mixed Mexican- and European-newcomer Canadian background—that multiple realities exist alongside one another.
Her work has be shown in galleries across Canada and internationally including at Art Gallery of Ontario, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, KIAC, Peninsula Arts, CAFKA, Third Space, Queens Museum, and Flux Factory, among others. Recent highlights for her practice include a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph, We Are Weather, which explored changing human relationships with weather; solo exhibitions Of Containers and Firestarts at Cambridge Art Galleries, and In Case of Emergency at Art Gallery of Mississauga, both of which investigated emergency as a state of being; the 2018 premier of the multi-faceted performance work Drinking Water in collaboration with choreographer Sete Tele at Tasdance (Australia). From 2019-2023 she was a thread residency artist with Towards Braiding, a program led by Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti working towards decolonial processes and sensibilities. In 2020 her book of poetry, Forests Not Yet Here, which emerges from texts written for participatory works, was published by Publication Studio Guelph.
She has also done artist residencies with Arts House Melbourne (TimePlaceSpace: Nomad), the Santa Fe Art Institute (Water Rights), the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (Rising Waters), the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (Soil Cultures), BIGCI, KIAC (the Natural + Manufactured) and the Camargo Foundation, and was the 2016 Artist-in-Residence for the City of Guelph. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Culture and Animals Foundation.
She has a Masters of Architecture from the University of Waterloo and is currently based in Canada. From 2009 until 2017 she created public work under the pseudonym DodoLab. An archive of that work can be found here.
With grateful acknowledgment of funding support from:
